However, in practice, I've noticed something. Our passive ability, Wild Call, has a 20% chance on each critical white swing to reset the cooldown of our next Dire Beast. Well, there have been a LOT of cases where it procs immediately on the first hit... and that proc is wasted, because Dire Beast wasn't on cooldown. And as our gear grows and our critical chance gets better again (im currently at 850 ilvl) this is happening more and more often.

Then I started trying something else: using Dire Beast as the very first thing I use to enter combat, instead of AMoC. The above situation still happens from time to time: but now the proc isn't wasted, and I'm starting the fight with 2x dire beasts, which means 2x orange swings from them, 2x focus regen for me, and 2x stomps on the target. Obviously after DB I keep the same priority as above.

While it is nice when it happens, I actually don't know if that represents a DPS gain. I've tried to test it but I'm dumb as fuck with sims and recounts. And I know it wouldn't be a big difference after all, but w/e, I'm always trying to improve a bit more :P

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Now I'm no expert on hunter by any means but I believe the reason we use dire beast after Beastial Wrath is because it lowers its CD. I suspect that using dire beast before Beastial Wrath in the hope of a proc is a potential dps loss. I cannot confirm this but i suspect Azortharian will have tested this in order to come up with the recommended opener, trust my this guy knows his stuff.

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Openers are overrated. Fights last several minutes, while in opener you spend several seconds. Whether you get that extra dire beast proc is largely irrelevant. Even if you sim, the difference between two profile is likely to be within random deviation.

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I would assume the biggest reason Dire Beast is later in the opener sequence is to take advantage of the cooldown reduction that Dire Beast gives to Bestial Wrath.

Because you're always sacrificing that additional cooldown reduction for a chance to have 2 dire beasts, I would imagine that it is an overall DPS loss.

Pretty much this and dire beast will gain focus so doesn't hurt to dump focus on something at the start. Openers are important as you can line up aspect of wild with crows , wrath and several kill commands with cobra shot resetting the cd with talent selected. Openers are in no way over rated if done correctly

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The difference between worst opener and best opener tends to zero as fight duration increases, and will not exceed a few hundreds thousands of damage, which is largely irrelevant when you're dealing tenths of millions over the course of the fight.

Obviously an opener is better than none, but it's not worth thinking too hard about it.